The DREAM Programme and paediatric care: an investment in Africa’s future
Children in Africa still represent the segment of the population that has the least access to care. Malnutrition, HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis, malaria and lack of hygiene contribute significantly to child mortality on the continent.
The DREAM Programme has always considered paediatric care to be extremely important: it is an investment in Africa’s future. It is in this context that the will to continue to protect and support children who, saved from AIDS and other diseases, are on their way to school was born.
In the poorest neighbourhoods, on the outskirts of the cities, children go to school with difficulty, with double or triple shifts, while in rural areas it is not uncommon to still find school groups of even 80 children at a time, doing school in the shade of a large tree. If any child has eyesight problems, it becomes virtually impossible to follow the lessons, they fall behind and these children often do not even learn to read and write.
They are left behind, with serious consequences for their development and their future.
This is why the existence of a first optical centre in the vicinity of Maputo, the capital of Mozambique, in an area where the DREAM Programme has been present since its beginnings in 2002, represents attention and support to the generation that is growing up and to whom we want to give back not only health, but also the tools to grow up well.
Today, in addition to the outpatient clinic for examinations and eye measurement, all strictly free of charge, the first workshop for making custom-made glasses for the children of the DREAM programme and its nutritional centres also opens.
Thanks to a combination of various important donations (those who donated the instrument for making the glasses, those who donated the lenses, those who donated the frames, and those who collaborated in the “remote” installation with great professionalism), today children in the area will be able to have their much-needed glasses.
Many, in fact, after a prescription cannot afford to buy glasses: they give up, and the few centres able to make custom-made glasses are very few and are only in the central districts of the capital.
From today, instead, those who need them can receive them, and with great surprise, for free!
From the willingness to donate something and the ability to work together comes a great response to the needs of the frail and a great help that can reach far.